POSTSCRIPT. by Percy Bysshe Shelley

This "poem" is actually a postscript written by Shelley's editor in 1913, recognizing a scholarly paper by A.C. Bradley that addressed errors in one of Shelley's published verse editions. It isn't a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley; rather, it's a note in prose regarding the editing of his work. In short, it's a housekeeping note for publishing that has been incorrectly classified as a poem.

Formal, straightforward, and appreciative. There’s no grand lyrical aspiration here — it reads like a thoughtful editor offering a public acknowledgment. The tone resembles a preface in an academic journal more than anything Shelley himself penned.

Percy Bysshe Shelley passed away in 1822, leaving a collection of work that was published and republished through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often with considerable textual inconsistencies. Editors relied on manuscripts, earlier printed editions, and scholarly commentary to create reliable versions of his texts. A.C. Bradley, who is perhaps best known today for his influential work *Shakespearean Tragedy* (1904), shared his corrective notes on Shelley's text in *The Modern Language Review* in October 1905. The editor who added this postscript, likely Thomas Hutchinson—whose 1904 Oxford edition of Shelley is widely referenced—integrated Bradley's insights into a revised edition released in 1913. As such, this note represents an early twentieth-century effort in editorial scholarship rather than a poem by Shelley himself.